Today, I have some really good news to report as the title above suggests.
For a generation or more, America’s high levels of child poverty set it apart from other rich nations, leaving millions of young people lacking support such as basic food and shelter amid mounting evidence that early hardship leaves children poorer, sicker and less educated as adults.
But with little public notice and accelerating speed, America’s children have become much less poor.
A comprehensive new analysis shows that child poverty has fallen 59% since 1993, with need receding on nearly every front. Child poverty has fallen in every state, and it has fallen by about the same degree among children who are white, Black, Hispanic and Asian, living with one parent or two and in native or immigrant households. Deep poverty, a form of especially severe deprivation, has fallen nearly as much.
In 1993, nearly 28% of children were in poverty, meaning their households lacked the income the government deemed necessary to meet basic needs. By 2019, before temporary pandemic aid drove it even lower, child poverty had fallen to about 11%.
Millions fewer children are considered poor today than were a quarter-century ago, according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, a rate calculated by the Census Bureau which takes government aid into account.
The Downward Trajectory of Child Poverty
Source: Child Trends, Census Bureau; chart courtesy of New York Times
Yet despite the decline in poverty, more than 8 million children still live in families that don’t have the income to meet their basic needs. With the poverty line low — about $29,000 for a family of four in a place with typical living costs, many families who escape poverty in the statistical sense still experience hardship.
Yet the sharp retreat of child poverty represents major progress and has drawn surprisingly little notice in the mainstream media and even among policy experts.
It has coincided with profound changes to the government safety net, which has become more stringent and more generous at times over the years. Starting in the 1990s, tough welfare laws shrank cash aid to parents without jobs. But other subsidies grew, especially for working families, and total federal spending on low-income children roughly doubled.
To examine the drop in child poverty, the New York Times collaborated with Child Trends, a nonpartisan research group with an expertise in statistical analysis. The joint project relied on the data the Census Bureau uses to calculate poverty rates but examined it over more years and in greater demographic detail.
The analysis found that multiple forces reduced child poverty, including lower unemployment, increased labor force participation among single mothers and the growth of state-level minimum wages. But a dominant factor was the large expansion of government aid.
In 1993, safety net programs cut child poverty by 9% from what it would have been absent the federal aid. By 2019, those programs had cut child poverty by 44%, and the number of children they removed from poverty more than tripled to 6.5 million.
“This is an astounding decline in child poverty,” said Dana Thomson, a co-author of the Child Trends study. “Its magnitude is unequaled in the history of poverty measurement, and the single largest explanation is the growth of the safety net.”
Renee Ryberg, another co-author, said the poverty reduction offered millions of children greater prospects of success. “A childhood free of poverty predicts better adult outcomes in just about every area you can imagine, including education, earnings and health,” she said.
The analysis excluded 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, because pandemic aid made it unrepresentative. Including it makes the decline since 1993 even greater, at 69%.
The plunge in child poverty is the opposite of what most liberal experts predicted a quarter-century ago when President Bill Clinton signed a law from a Republican Congress to “end welfare as we know it.”
Conservatives say the landmark law pushed more parents to work and call it the main reason child poverty declined. Progressives say many working families would still be poor without the expanded safety net, which grew in part to compensate for stagnant wages amid decades of rising inequality. In this case, both groups are probably correct.
In any event, a patchwork of programs shaped by a century of political conflict and compromise, the safety net bears the imprint of both parties and commands the satisfaction of neither. And critics of all sorts, including those getting aid, complain of red tape.
Yet whatever its flaws, the safety net depicted in the Child Trends data has lifted a record share of children from poverty. “The federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won,” President Ronald Reagan said a generation ago. But with child poverty at a record low, that narrative of defeat appears obsolete.
Finally, even with the child poverty rate down almost 60% since 1993, there is still more work to be done. But it is a real pleasure to report this good news today!
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.